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My ISP was just dealing me fits. I have an antenna on my roof that connects to a tower that goes to a hub in the nearby capital city. Because they don’t have a designated frequency and operate on 900mHZ, I was just screwed. Connection up…connection down…connection up…connection down… Let alone my Skype call with my trading team. They were seriously considering buying airline tickets and coming out and putting two in the chest and one in the head! So I bit the bullet and moved to town. It was a hard move for me because I felt like I had failed at the home office. I think I was going downhill anyway. I wasn’t taking a shower every day, working in yesterday’s clothes, eating all the time (gained 35#). Maybe I was on my way to failure…maybe this is good. I still feel bad.
My autotrader work is going well. So let’s say it’s autotrader (lower case) because really all it does is enter a trade when the conditions I set are right, track the trade with moving stops and trails and exits on targets or stops. Why build an autotrader? It’s the way I learn. If I want to learn what an indicator does, I tear it apart and put it back together. Trading, same way. So what I did was take the Hurley AutoTrader (Notice I use big letters here) and started learning how it worked. Thousands of hours later…other than I know where the original strategy came from, there is no similarity to my strategy and the Hurley strategy. I still owe Big Mike a load of thanks, for the insight. Without which I would not have an autotrader. The reason for all this work is so I can backtest and optimize and keep the configuration. Another nice thing about my autotrader is I can run it in pause mode, it tells me when to enter a trade and I can just push the button. Here’s a picture (attachedd) of the 6E from this morning with my autotrader running.
Anyway, now I am off to figuring out optimization. There are some threads here on futures.io (formerly BMT), but the info is kind of sparse. I see some hinting at making different optimization types. Further research will be required.
So here is how I built this autotrader. First I developed some indicators. [Now keep in mind this was not a master plan from the get go, this just happened, but it would make a good book J] Anyhow, back to my wonderful adventure. I built (and shared here on futures.io (formerly BMT)) these indicators: AaADX, AaBollinger, AaCCI, DoubleSuperTrend, AaDSZL, AaMACD, AaMA, AaMAvsMA, and AaWilder. So I put each one of these into the system. So now if you do all the iterations, I have ‘infinity’ times ‘infinity’ for options. Pretty cool huh? I know there are some that would say this is just stupid. How can you run a strategy like this? Well, I get to choose the ones I want and let the others slide. Let’s say somebody comes up with this great system of a MACD and two moving averages. I want to see how it works, I just plug in the numbers and presto…I have a system I can run through backtesting/optimizing to see if it has value. The great part about this is I know the basic program works and changing variables is just a step in the process. Here’s a picture of the modules I built.
Here’s a picture of what this looks like with all of the indicators on. Nice! Parents are always proud of their kids, even if they are a mess! J Seriously, who would be able to keep track of all these parameters? My computer can!
At this point I need to make a disclaimer; I had a whole bunch of help from other people at futures.io (formerly BMT) who wrote indicators that I got ideas from and put my own touches on them. I am an confirmed plagiaristic hacker. I get ideas from this place and that place and put them together with my own ideas to get what I am looking for. If I got the idea from someone else, I made sure to give credit where credit was due. But mostly I just pick over their work like Thursday night after the Thanksgiving Day feast.
So now I am in optimizer land. I hit all the threads in futures.io (formerly BMT) and found the subject is not well documented and even less support from NinjaTrader. So I am back to learning. I got the System Quality Number optimizer program understood. Did some of my standard hacking. You know line up all the words, change some comments, UNDERSTAND…little things like that. My hat is really off to people who have developed some of these pieces of code. They are true works of art. So now I am working on expectancy. Got most of the things done, still working on ‘scratch’ or ‘break-even’ trades. Haven’t cracked that nut…yet. Pretty cool stuff. When I get it done, I will post it. Why not? I get help from people here at futures.io (formerly BMT). How can I expect people to help me if I am going to play I’ve got a secret?
I am seeing a pattern. Part of my issue is depression. It has been over two years since I got fired. Still having a tough time with that. Going from a high level executive to nobody special in the snap of a finger. I can rationalize it in my mind, but can’t make my heart feel good about it. I was in the military for years, but never suffered the PTSD that I am feeling with my termination. So I press on…
Trading today was hard. It was hard yesterday. I have adopted a trading method of watching these charts. Go long when it looks like it is going to go long and protect my capital. I get a lot of stop outs and a lot of small profits, but I was again able to reach my daily goal…$250 (see attached).
You can read this thread (and a whole bunch more just like it) and you will see a lot of good advice. A lot of it is the trading mentality (psychology), entries, exits, but not a lot on the money. At some point (at least for me) I need to make money. It doesn’t do me any good to have good charts and pretty pictures yet I still go home at night a financial loser. Frankly, I need the money.
I have debated journaling since I really don’t have anything new, exciting, earth shattering or whatever to implement or declare to the world. Truth is I’m just a guy to hammer out a living. Maybe this will provide hope for someone or a reality check for someone, or just make me feel better because I am putting my feelings out there for me to consider. Anyway, I am going for the latter. If you are reading this, thanks, but there are better advisers out there. Be sure to use your time wisely.
My three Skype buddies and I are going to give the autotrader a test run next week. We have been working with it for months, but this test is use the same strategy across all four systems and see what we get for results. Here are the systems:
California – Windows 7, IQ Feed.
Kansas – XP, ZenFire.
New Jersey – Windows 7, ZenFire.
England – XP, ZenFire.
We are going to execute the same strategy on five charts:
6E-144tick 3 period Better Line Break
6E-144tick 3 period Better Line Break (different strategy)
CL-500tick 3 period Better Line Break
TF-233tick 3 period Better Line Break
YM-144tick 3 period Better Line Break
That makes a simple chart (picture attached).
The purpose is simple. Can we duplicate a winning strategy across different parts of the globe with different feeds. This is not a definitive test, but I would dare say there are a lot of software vendors out there hawking their wares that haven’t done as much work as we have. Anyways, it will be an interesting test. I have thrown in the configuration settings for the test strategies.
When I ran these through the backtester for the last month, here are the results I got. Don’t look all that good do they?
If you are unemployed by choice, meaning you want to make trading work, then really all you are doing is making it more difficult to succeed. Trying to become a full time professional trader while having no income to support your family adds so much pressure that money is all you can think about. It won't work. All you have to do is evaluate everyones sim performance vs real performance to see that psychology plays a major role in success, and if you are trading with your retirement fund or rent money, the psychology is going to be against you 100x over.
If you are in a position where you had enough cushion to be able to say "I'm going to try trading for a while", then ask yourself - is it still a cushion? Or is it getting down to a nasty, bumpy, incredibly uncomfortable place to be, with no padding left. If it's the latter, then once again psychology is going to be against you.
Last, I noticed you are putting your efforts into automation. All I can do is speak from personal experience and say that automation is much harder to be long term profitable than with a discretionary method, in my opinion and experience. People gravitate towards automation to try and solve trading problems like discipline, patience, poor judgement, etc. The problem is there is no short cut in trading, and I am glad that I finally stopped looking at automation one day as the "cure" to my trading, and instead faced facts directly and squarely - I needed to solve my own underlying problems.
If you haven't already, you might want to watch my 3 hour webinar that talks about me, my trading, my background, my obstacles, etc. Maybe you will find something useful that can help you. The link is:
But the bottom line, my advice, is to solve the problems surrounding you outside of trading first. Don't look to trading to solve them, but in fact the opposite. You must solve the external factors first if you wish to be successful at trading. As I talked about at length in my webinar, it's the hardest thing I've ever done in my life, and I basically had to drastically change my entire life in order to get to a place where I could become successful with my trading.
Tired today from roofing all this weekend. Too hot and too steep. My feet hurt and I can’t stay awake. My automatic trades were VERY bad! My hand trading did okay, but was poorly implemented by me. I made my goal and then got greedy. Once you start down the greedy path, you start paying stupid tax. I paid a lot of stupid tax today. Got back profitable and lost it all AGAIN and then some. This is not smart trading this is just being stupid (thus the need to be taxed!). I will not make it with these habits. Just won’t happen.
I have a couple of setups based on an indicator that I would like to semi automate. Is the Hurley AutoTrader something that would be useful for that? Could you point me in the right direction if it is?
